Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

Perhaps the lazy way to consider
the move is to see this as part of the match for state supremacy between
current Gov. Bobby
Jindal and Sen. David Vitter, the
latter already having taken the plunge to replace the former. Jindal cannot run
for a third consecutive term, so to stay on top of things he must resort to a
surrogate, the thinking goes, and with Angelle having been a Jindal cabinet
appointee, temporary lieutenant governor, and legislative go-between for the
governor he fits the bill.

Assuredly that’s part of it, but
Angelle put himself out there primarily because he thinks he can win without
being (overall) a rigidly principled conservative like Jindal. It’s tempting,
but ultimately reductionist, to write off Angelle as a Jindal clone. Recognize
that Angelle came to politics in the state from an insider’s family, and as a
Democrat, whose outward conservatism one senses doesn’t quite match Jindal’s all-his-life
unshakeable fervency but more opportunistically as in the mode of several
ex-Democrat legislators who as soon as Republicans came within sniffing distance
of a legislative majority jumped ship. His actions on the PSC seem to confirm
that, where he’s demonstrated he will defect
strategically from a pure free-market, anti-crony capitalist, right-sized
government agenda.

2.10.14

As good economic news has flowed around
Louisiana over the past few years – low unemployment, job creation, and
announcements of new jobs coming online – some policy-makers have wondered why these
seem only
partially reflected in state tax collections. Others say this level of
success has constrained the labor market to the point that it might hamper
major expansions seen on the horizon. The process to reconcile the notions
that a healthy labor market on the verge of a squeeze, but one not well translated
into economic growth that brings increased tax revenues, begins with an interesting
report from the Legislative Fiscal Office.

The LFO has taken to putting out,
between legislative sessions, a monthly newsletter investigating fiscal topics
of its choosing, and in this past month among other items looked
at Louisiana’s job growth relative to the south and the country as a whole.
Choosing Feb. 2010 as a baseline, due to the judgment that this was the nadir
of the 2008 recession, since then (through Aug. 2014 preliminary figures) overall
employment growth has lagged the south and country. This is because while
private sector job growth has been about the same for all three, there has been
substantial retraction in government employment in Louisiana. This could
explain why sales and income tax receipt increases have been tepid.

But to focus on this alone, if
not reductionist, stops way short of fully understanding the dynamics. In
March, for the first
time ever the state cracked the 2 million employed number, and while
receding slightly from its April high mark since is still above that benchmark.
And the August preliminary number showed the most people in the active
workforce ever for the state, at about 2.13 million. As a result of these numerical
perambulations, the state’s unemployment rate fell from its 6.9 percent rate in
Feb. 2010 to the preliminary 5.8 this August – which is up considerably from
the early spring number of 4.5 percent, as a result of about 30,000 more people
in the labor force in that six months but only about 1,000 more jobs over that
period. By contrast, government
jobs have fallen 10 percent from that Feb. 2010 baseline, or about 34,000,
and over 2,000 alone since the spring – leaving the fewest government jobs in
Louisiana since 1991.

1.10.14

Special interests in Louisiana’s public
education system have not given up in trying to protect their power and
privilege, as indicated by a suit filed regarding funding of charter schools
that seeks to erode the state’s school choice options.

An alliance of regressive forces,
school boards and teacher unions, will argue
in front of state district court that, essentially, certain kinds of
charter schools are ineligible for funding through the main mechanism of apportioning
state financial support to public education, the Minimum Foundation Program.
They argue that some types, roughly 25 schools drawing $60 million from the
over $3 billion distributed, are not “public” schools and not run by a school
district of some kind. Therefore, they claim the MFP is ineligible through
which to channel money.

This echoes the decision
last year where the Louisiana Supreme Court determined that MFP money could
not go to funding the scholarship voucher program that pays parents a chit that
can be used at a private school, as it said the purpose of the MFP was for
public education. And even as this logic provides a rationale for a suit on
this basis, it also provides the grounds to reject it absent a very activist role
on part of the judiciary.

30.9.14

At least the gripe
session about changes to health insurance benefits of state employees,
retirees, and some school board employees didn’t drag the entire Louisiana
House of Representatives back, just its Appropriations Committee, and some useful
information did come out about the issue. Which makes this as good as any time
to reveal myths that for political reasons are being circulated about it.

In short, three years ago the
fund that maintains reserves, which is the excess of monies paid in from premiums
from taxpayers (typically 75 percent) and clients (typically 25 percent) over
expenses was around $500 million. The Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration then decided to cut premium rates a total of 9
percent. This meant both ratepayers and the state paid less, the latter being
able to use tens of millions of unused dollars in the past two budget years for
other purposes. It also opted to privatize claims administration to save on
bureaucratic costs. While that went into effect this year, rates also were increased
5 percent, and pharmacy benefits changed a couple of months ago that increased
costs to some users. Starting next plan year (Jan. 1), while premiums are not
proposed to increase, non-pharmacy benefits will change that likely means in
the aggregate clients will pay more in health care costs, because of changes to
co-payments, deductibles, and covered services. Meanwhile, rising costs of
health care with lower premiums have put the reserve on track to go close to
zero by the end of the fiscal year (Jun. 30).

Some politicians and special
interests have seized upon this series of events to put forward dubious claims,
none of which are true:

29.9.14

Whoever the next mayor of
Shreveport will be, that person will have to face and will need to solve a capital
projects crunch that shows no signs of abating, because of sins of the past.

This spring a report by the city pointed out the dire straits in which the city finds
itself in this election year. It highlighted what it claimed were $1.5 billion
in needed improvements, but naturally not all of these items are of genuine
high priority and necessary. For example, an intelligent traffic system
certainly would ease congestion, but it’s not a life or death matter,
especially when it could cost as much as $60 million.

But clean water with a federal
mandate is another matter. The most pressing concern on the list was the
estimated $342 million needed to be spent over the next dozen years to
rehabilitate a city water system that has been crumbling for years as it spent
precious dollars on things like a convention center, hotel, and sludge pits, the
effects of this disrepair drawing the ire of the Environmental Protection
Agency. A consent
decree between it and the city that was hammered out late last year means
the city must start spending about $34 million a year on this beginning in 2015.

28.9.14

As the federal government moves
towards completion of a ratings system for higher education, Louisiana State
University System President and Baton Rouge campus Chancellor F.
King Alexander has become one of the louder advocates in favor of such a
plan, last week penning an opinion
piece praising the concept and often quoted
on the matter. Past a certain point it’s a good idea, but up to that point
and no farther it becomes an exercise in self-interest for academia.

Early in his second term Pres. Barack Obama
shook up the insular world of higher education by proposing that federal aid to
students be tied to some performance measures, in some ways like the system
that states like Louisiana operate in terms of funding directly their state
colleges. Since then the overall
reaction within higher education has been negative, but pockets favorable
at least to some changes have emerged, falling along two particular fault
lines: whether the institution is for-profit and whether the institution is
public, with for profit schools the least supportive and public schools the
most, relatively speaking. This is because, as Alexander has implied,
for-profit schools with disproportionately higher consumption of federal aid
dollars – these for institutions and students now eclipsing
federal discretionary spending on housing and community affairs,
international affairs, energy and the environment, and transportation combined
– but lower completion rates makes them “bad actors” that cast a negative view
over all of higher education.

Even so, public schools have
given lukewarm at best acquiescence to the idea, mainly because they are torn
in the purposes that the ratings could perform. There seems consensus among
them that they could live with tying simple metrics such as completion rates
and proportions of graduates employed being reported and used for
accountability purposes, even as some also want greater complexity added to any
such index created, such as a measure of “readiness” where scores are adjusted
favorably for a school the higher is the proportion of presumably less prepared
students they admit.

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